Zen and the Art of Software Development

(This is the textual version of my video on the YouTube channel for this Blog, Zen and the Art of Software Development)

Let’s start with admitting that we’re in an “AI Bubble”; We have almost daily announcements on new AI related products, or predictions on where we are heading with them. A large part of the product announcements are not for things that we can actually get and use now, but rather for the “in development” or “in research” ones, which (reality check) doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll eventually get them. The products that we do get, don’t always fully deliver on their promises, but again that is normal, given that we need to filter out the “marketing speak”. This should not surprise us, and any acknowledged or claimed limitations invariably end up in the “really soon now” lists. The really interesting predictions are those that are based on current or proposed research, because this is where creativity is actually required to come up with a product or application. Combine that with the obvious need for the budget to burn on this research and (hopefully) development, and suddenly Science Fiction is just around the corner. We’ve even seen predictions where a price-tag was put (provisionally, of course) on an AI capable of replacing senior developers or even PhD level researchers.